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David Velasquez is a Gates Millennium Scholar in the Urban Education Policy PhD program at the University of Southern California. He is interested in how practitioners and organizations can remove barriers and improve supports to aid low-income, students of color in persisting through college. This interest guides his research focus on community colleges, developmental math, vertical transfer, and policy implementation. He is a research assistant working with Dr. Tatiana Melguizo in the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the Rossier School of Education.

Prior to USC, David taught math at high schools throughout South Los Angeles. He received his Master's degree in Education with a focus on Urban Teaching and a bilingual authorization (BCLAD) in Spanish from UCLA . He earned a B.A. in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and spent time conducting research at the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in Washington, D.C.. While there, he analyzed trends among successful transfer of low-income students and students of color from community college to public four year institutions which led him to see the leaks in the mathematics pipeline as an opportunity to increase college persistence.